SunSoft offers a glimpse into new SunNet Manager

Mountain View, Calif.

SunSoft, Inc. is at work on the next major release of its Solstice SunNet Manager platform, which will give customers greater control over Novell, Inc. NetWare LANs and supply users with prepackaged MIBs to simplify management of other vendors' net products.

SunSoft is also filling a promise it made earlier this year to foster manager-to-manager com- munications with Hewlett-Packard Co. OpenView consoles.

The new SunNet Manager release will be integrated with Novell's ManageWise software to help users handle fault and configuration management tasks for their NetWare clients and servers. Initially, the SunNet Manager/ManageWise integration will take place at the topology level, with SunNet Manager extracting NetWare topology map data from ManageWise.

That is an extension of the integration plans announced by the firms two years ago, said Brian Biles, SunSoft's group marketing manager for Enterprise Management Products. The new SunNet Manager re-lease will be announced and ready to ship in the first half of 1996.

The MIB connection

The new version also will include Management Information Bases (MIB) from SunSoft's third-party developers, which include Bay Networks, Inc., Cabletron Systems, Inc., Cisco Systems, Inc. and 3Com Corp. Users will get a wealth of data about the attributes of devices managed by SunNet Manager when they purchase the platform software, instead of having to get the MIBs from each vendor or writing MIB tables themselves.

"That can be handy because the MIB compiler they've had on SunNet Manager was a real dog," said Ron Hood, manager of network administration at the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center in Seattle.

The new version also will feature stronger event management, improved discovery, layout and device health-monitoring capabilities, and a read-only management console, Biles said. The read-only management console will be a configuration op-tion on SunNet Manager that allows users to monitor the status of the managed environment but not change it. That is useful for security and training purposes, he said.

The new platform will bolster SunNet Manager's capabilities at the workgroup level, where it is now positioned following the January introduction of the Solstice Enterprise Manager.

In 1997, SunSoft will unveil an application that allows users to link OpenView consoles through SunSoft's Cooperative Consoles software. This application will take advantage of a new version of Cooperative Consoles, slated for early 1996, that includes application program interfaces to let users extend the product's capabilities.

Cooperative Consoles adds multiuser capabilities to the single-user SunNet Manager. It allows multiple SunNet Managers to cooperatively handle multiple net domains by establishing mana-ger-to-manager communication between them.

The new application will enable the same kind of manager-to-manager ca-pability between OpenView consoles, something OpenView currently cannot do.

This will allow users to deploy OpenView consoles or a mix- ture of OpenView and SunNet Manager platforms as distributed, multiuser domain managers capable of exchanging event, topology and other management data.

HP and IBM plan to add multiuser capabilities to their platforms but are not likely to develop software that will exchange event and topology data with rival platforms.

SunSoft at that time will also enable SunNet Manager to share event and topology data with Solstice Enterprise Manager, the company's object-oriented platform for enterprise and telecommunications net and systems management. This will allow users to configure a hierarchical management structure in which SunNet Managers and OpenViews serve as management feeder nodes into Solstice Enterprise Manager.

SunSoft had originally stated plans to link SunNet Manager and Solstice Enterprise Manager through Cooperative Consoles later this year (NW, Feb. 6, page 1). And by waiting until 1997 to deliver the application that links OpenView to Cooperative Consoles, analysts believe SunSoft is missing a significant market opportunity, given HP's problems with getting a distributed OpenView out the door.

"By that point, HP's recovered," said John McConnell, president of McConnell Consulting, Inc. in Boulder, Colo. HP is expected to ship Tornado, the distributed version of OpenView, in mid-1996.

Pricing was not available by press time.

SunSoft: (415) 960-3200.